In one of last week’s blog posts, we discussed some of the difficulties a field service company faced without having a tool to plan out their mobile employees’ work orders in advance. In addition to productivity and brand reputation suffering due to confusions in scheduling, the company was also spending too much money on paper documents to instruct staff that were handwritten and, at times, illegible.

Our flagship workforce management software Encore now enables businesses to manage workloads ahead of time with its Dispatching Scheduler feature. Available exclusively to users of the solution’s Ultimate tier, the Dispatching Scheduler provides an easy, yet intuitive way for your team to plan out customer visits and increase its efficiency.

Features of Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler:

A color-coded dashboard that provides easy identification for work order progress.

The ability to create service delivery windows for employees dispatched to new customer locations.

A feature for reassigning pending orders to new workers on the fly.

Calendar and Schedule rows that display availabilities, last known employee locations, and current assignments.

The ability to see lists of unassigned orders and drag and drop them onto user schedules.

Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler dashboard.

Benefits of Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler:

Distribute workloads more evenly.

Optimize employee schedules for higher efficiency.

Save time and money with intuitive scheduling that helps to keep employees informed.

Provide customers with more accurate service delivery times.

Graphics-based scheduling allows your staff to work faster and more interactively.

When applied to the field service use case, it’s easy to see how this powerful new capability could instantly improve the company’s processes. Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler allowed the business’s mobile employees to have easy access to their daily schedules, eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth communication from the office to the field and giving them a much more accurate timeframe for service deliveries. Due to both an increase in productivity and efficiency with the Dispatching Scheduler, their business was able to save significant revenue and also increase its opportunities from a strengthened reputation amongst its customer base.

Last week, we introduced you to the world of our Professional Services team, a group of talented individuals who are responsible for spearheading the more labor-intensive integration projects that some of our customers don’t have the resources to execute for themselves.

While we continue to explore the various projects that our Professional Services team takes on, you’ll quickly see that their capabilities are quite extensive. Last time, we showed you how they were able to save one company a lot of time and money by creating a custom business intelligence dashboard. This week, we’re going to take a look at how they handled QuickBooks integration with another of our customers.

Order Integration with QuickBooks

The Challenge: This delivery service was using QuickBooks Online (QBO) as their invoicing tool to keep track of orders that needed to be delivered. Historically, they would print out the invoices for their drivers at the beginning of each workday, which drivers used to appropriately load their vehicles and then refer to at each delivery site.

Rather than continue to rely on this tedious process, the customer wanted to have invoice information automatically feed into Encore via the Dispatching tool. This would allow the back office to save time and resources by cutting back on so much printing. Plus, drivers wouldn’t have to haul piles of paperwork around every day.

The Solution: Our Professional Services team was able to create a workflow that synced the customer’s QuickBooks Online account with our Encore solution. So now, whenever the customer creates an invoice using QBO, the integration our team put together — using Microsoft Flow — automatically generates an order in Encore.

Taking it a step further, they also added a feature that would create a PDF of each QBO invoice. These invoices can be uploaded to a Dropbox account, with a sharable URL included on each order form, allowing drivers to easily view the full invoice, as the customer would receive it, right on their phones.

The solution that Professional Services came up with for this customer greatly sped up their processes and ultimately saved them both time and money. It’s just another example of the innovative thinking this team puts forward and demonstrates the potential return for your business if you were to take advantage of their expertise.

Here at Actsoft, we pride ourselves not only on our ability to provide companies with affordable, easy-to-implement solutions that help them reshape the way they do business every day, but also in being able to offer additional services that go one step further and help implement our software in ways that companies may never have realized was possible, nor would have had the ability to execute themselves.

For these types of projects, our Professional Services team is available to take on the intricate back-end work on your behalf, handling all the development work necessary to get you up and running as fast as possible with a more powerful, time- and money-saving system in place, to help make your company realize its true potential.

So what types of projects can our Professional Services team handle? Glad you asked. We’re going to start sharing a selection of use cases — all from real Actsoft customers — to give you a better understanding of just what our talented team can do.

Creating a Custom Business Intelligence Dashboard

The Challenge: This customer, who operates a refrigeration service business, needed an easy way for their technicians to quickly review customer history and know what tasks had previously been performed. Historically, their method was inefficient and required techs to call the office, relay equipment serial numbers, request that an on-the-spot report be pulled, and then have the service history relayed.

Making matters worse, there was no way for the office to pull reports based on serial numbers. They could only search by user and date range and since there was no way to know when the equipment was last serviced and by whom, they had to pull a much broader report and scour through significantly more results for the serial number in question in order to find the needed information.

To say the least, it was not efficient.

The Solution: Our Professional Services team was able to create an integration that automatically saved all of the company’s equipment history forms, which then fed into a business intelligence dashboard that displays all submissions. They built a search filter that allows users to search specifically for the serial number. From there, they could review the history specifically for that unit.

To make it even easier, our team generated a URL for the dashboard, meaning that technicians can easily access the database from the field (as long as they have mobile service) and search for the equipment history themselves … without having to call the office.

Just imagine all the time this company is now saving from this easy-to-use feature. That’s the kind of game-changing solution our Professional Services team excels at delivering to our customers. Think about what they could do for your business.

Whether your field service business deals in machinery installation, commercial repair work, landscaping, or industrial servicing, the need for efficiency persists. And as employees of field service-based companies are typically supplied with tasks located away from the office, transparency between company headquarters and remote work zones is key to a job well done.

At Actsoft, we know the inconveniences that can be posed from the burden of having to manage a mobile workforce, and the diversity of the field service industry makes it a perfect fit with the power of our versatile solutions. Here’s a few of the ways that our software is able to bring extra efficiency, sharpened communication, and greater modernity to your workforce’s operations.

Staying connected

Directing in near real-time is simpler than ever with Actsoft’s solutions. Your field technicians can remain connected to headquartered administrators by using GPS Tracking, Messaging, and Job Dispatching to facilitate better communications channels, and make adjustments on the fly. Quickly disseminating directives out to your team’s various components also becomes a much easier process, once the power of mobile technology has been tapped into. Our solutions excel at integrating smartphones and tablets with the desktop computers at your home office, tying everything together digitally.

Increasing efficiency

If your field service company was given a tool for reducing wasted time, improving productivity, and holding employees more accountable all in one, what more could it accomplish? Using the features of our software packages, feel free to save your business more money and resources. Unnecessary trips to the office can be trimmed down with Timekeeping, as staff can clock in and out remotely via mobile devices. Give back more time for your employees to tend to the needs of customers in the field, and make the most out of every work day by enhancing your team’s productivity.

Powering workforces

The future landscape for mobile workforces includes an increasing reliance on technology to streamline operations. Teams that are managed using the latest in business-enhancing solutions are poised for success, savings, and tighter coordination. Let’s get to work on making your business thrive, with the capabilities of our unparalleled solutions supporting it the entire way forward.

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